


Epping Forest

by Luscinnia



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Crime Scene, Drabble, Gen, cases, trigger warning: suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-16
Updated: 2014-04-16
Packaged: 2018-01-19 15:32:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1474930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luscinnia/pseuds/Luscinnia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lestrade is called to a possible crime scene.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Epping Forest

The rain is drumming against the window and I ponder over things past. Sometimes those images come back and float over me like memories from films I saw or passages of books I read. I can recall names; more often I fail to do so.  
Those are snapshots and hardly any of them show a person smiling into the focus of the camera.  
The camera that is my eyes and mind. I had no proper idea what I would stumble into and now I find myself realising that I had been working for the homicide division for more than two decades. We solved many cases. A lot remained unsolved.

 

Although I’m still dedicated to my job I find myself growing weary of it. Too many abysses I looked into and too many twisted minds I had to listen to.  
There had been times before when I doubted my decisions; times when I thought about leaving it all behind and move on or at least away from homicides and crime scenes, from those countless hours facing forced deaths in every possible variation. Everytime I thought it was the worst thing I ever saw something new appeared and I realised that those evidences I looked at are just the tip of the iceberg.

There had been times when I nearly broke apart; when everything became too much, too close, but I always kept on going. Like I will keep on going now.  
I guess I simply can’t escape myself when it comes to this.  
The applications for private security firms are countless and not one of them had found the way into a pillar box.

Not everything is dark and bitter.  
But right now I am and that makes me miss the other side.  
I learnt from the best, that it is never good to draw a conclusion before one knows all the facts. It should be an elemental knowledge to everyone but we are all different and judge differently.  
We are biased and I don’t mark an exception. I see a drunkard in the homeless guy sitting on the ground although I should know it better by now.  
There may be those helpless drunkards among them but who am I to assume that this particular man is one of them?

As I said, I learnt from the best.

Those thoughts are otiosely right now as I find my way through the spinney of Epping Forest, leaving the comfort warmth that is the shelter in form of the squad car behind facing the rain and the darkness of the dead hours of the night.  
Every policeman or -woman in the whole of London must have been here to search for a missing person or a corpse at least once in their career. Sometimes I really wish criminals would be more creative but that would make this job even harder.  
The call was – as far as I have been told by now – anonymous and came about thirty minutes ago. The patrol officers just found an empty car and going by the state of it, it had been here for quite a while now. The caller must have mentioned the car and the name of the owner; homicide sounded possible, likely even. Better be safe than sorry.

I curse under my breath as my trousers leg gets caught by a clingy branch and nearly torn.  
The cadaver dog has already been requested but it will take them at least an hour to be here. Sometimes I wonder why we get so hectic at all. Going by what we know at this point the man is supposed to be dead. But it will always be this silly hope that we may find a survivor instead of a body in decay. Always, always this. Hope.

Since years I carry this piece of chalk around. It is a small piece of ordinary chalk like they used to have in schools before everything got modernised, even the chalkboards.  
There are times where I completely forget about it. I used it once.  
Despite the common believe the bodies of dead victims are never outlined with chalk or heir position marked with tape. This happens when they are still alive and have to be taken away by an ambulance as fast as possible.  
How much sadness and frustration a single small piece of chalk can impersonate.

The rain gets heavier and I start to question the sense of even bothering with waiting for the K-9 unit to arrive. The ground is soaked and the darkness gets thicker under the crowns of trees. I start to freeze although we hurry, still thoroughly searching the ground for signs, for a dead man.

He is not on or in the ground as we have to find out a second later.  
Hours later will I still feel the tapping of his toes against my shoulder. As if they left a cold mark where death touched me.  
Luckily enough I don’t scream but I can feel how my skin crawls upon the eerie sight in the beams from our flashlights.

“Suicide.”, my colleague says and I can only agree. It is so obvious and even if I learnt from the best and can see his doubting look in my mind’s eye is this a textbook suicide.

We will later have the first impression confirmed by the pathologist, his ex-wife and his best friend. They all got a note, a last message and the man who hung himself in Epping Forest. He planned his parting from the world over long period of time. Took care of furniture, his possessions, his last will and testament. A neat death.  
He becomes a number and a folder in the archives.

I suffer from the cold I caught that night the entire next week and my piece of chalk remained unused but never useless in the depth of my pocket.


End file.
